


Shrapnel

by DoodlesOfTheMind



Series: Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: ANBU Vice-Commander!Tenzou, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical poor coping mechanisms, F/M, Female characters getting the development they deserve, Gen, M/M, Madara is not Obito, Master Weaponsmith!Mikoto
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24380803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoodlesOfTheMind/pseuds/DoodlesOfTheMind
Summary: Loosely chronological snippets along the timeline of Fracture. Various POVs.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Maito Gai | Might Guy, Hatake Kakashi/Uchiha Itachi, Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka, Hatake Kakashi/Uzuki Yuugao, Hatake Kakashi/Yamato | Tenzou, Hoshigaki Kisame/Uchiha Itachi, Mitarashi Anko/Uchiha Shisui, Most "ships" can be read as Gen or Otherwise, Namiashi Raidou/Shiranui Genma, Uchiha Fugaku/Uchiha Mikoto, Uchiha Itachi/Uchiha Shisui, Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto, Uchiha Shisui/Uchiha Itachi/Mitarashi Anko
Series: Show Me the Glint of Light on Broken Glass [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1760440
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	Shrapnel

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry, y'all, I got distracted and wrote this instead of actually working on Fracture! It was a wonderful form of procrastination that took over my *entire* week and I'm probably going to continue these companion pieces in parallel to Fracture as the story progresses. As always, I live and breathe for your feedback and hope these scattershot moments in our favorite ninja trainwrecks' lives add something to the story that's become my favorite project.
> 
> Wishing you love and light (not that there's much of it in the Broken Glass-verse so far!)
> 
> Warning: graphic description of harm to a child in paragraph two only (Fugaku's POV, he is not the victim or the abuser) and occasional oblique references to suicide because we're dealing with Konoha's biggest martyr and Hatake Sakumo's deeply traumatized son. Please read with care if these are triggering for you.

Anko knows deception, knows _secrets_ the way Genin know the stars. Hard-learned, but vital to survival. She navigates by lies the way her four-man squad follows the Southern Cross home from Lightning Country. So she knows something’s fishy when a kid in Jounin blues ducks out of a tiny tea shop just as she enters. She swipes a stick of dango from an unguarded plate and takes a circuitous route timed to intersect the boy’s path a quarter mile down the road. It’s easy enough to stay behind him and observe; he doesn’t stop at any of the open air market stalls, doesn’t fall into step with a friend or comrade as the crowd thickens. The Uchiha fan emblazoned across his sleeve probably has something to do with the wide berth Konoha’s citizens give him. Hot chakra that’s smooth as glass and quiet as a shadow does the rest. That uniform isn’t a child’s affectation, then. She follows him out of the commerce district and across the open fields of Ueno Park, where he stops in the shade of a cherry blossom tree. One pale pink petal catches in his long hair as it falls, and suddenly Anko feels cold steel at the back of her neck. A low voice demands her name and intentions, and she grins wickedly because this is about to be the most fun she’s had all _day_. But the kid ruins it. A soft command, “Enough, Shisui,” and the figure at Anko’s back vanishes in a surge of chakra and displaced air. A boy her own age appears at the kid’s side, directly in Anko’s line of fire as if she were suicidal enough to take a potshot at even a baby Uchiha. The kid calmly passes his companion a slender plastic box tied with an emerald ribbon, the Green Turtle tea shop’s mascot clearly visible on the outer edge. He pulls a second one from his belt pouch and after a brief hesitation, extends it toward Anko. A peace offering, even if the other boy is still poised to take her head off at the slightest provocation. In the mood to tempt fate, she crosses the open grass and takes it, which is how she ends up watching the evening blossoms, sharing dango and canned tea with Itachi and Shisui.

Fugaku stands over a hospital bed in a private ward, and something inside him breaks. Uchiha Nanami, Genin, eight years old. He’s committed the list of her injuries to memory. Broken left collarbone. Dislocated shoulder. Three broken ribs, one of which pierced her lung. Grade three concussion. Bilateral orbital blowout fractures over scarred chakra nodes. Two shattered knuckles because Haruko’s daughter gave as good as she got. The officer who found her reported that her hitai-ate was staked to the side of a rubbish bin, her own kodachi rammed through its center. He knows her sword, sixty centimeters precisely with midnight blue silk tied in a traditional tsumami maki pattern over the tsuka. Mikoto gave it to her at her Academy graduation last summer, the slender blade hand-forged in her pristine workshop behind their home. Jounin pay a month’s wages for Uchiha steel, and not even he sets foot through the doorway without a bow to the clan’s master weaponsmith. Nanami may never wield a blade again. Hyuuga-sensei’s assessment was noncommittal at best (“It’s too soon to say, Uchiha-sama. I’ve placed an array of seals to limit the strain on her eyes, but we’ll know more after tomorrow’s healing session.”). He can read between the lines, one doujutsu bloodline to another. When Nanami wakes up, she may have brain damage. She may be blind. He doesn’t have to catch the perpetrators to know why she was attacked, beaten and left for dead in her own village. He _will_ catch them, personally, by daybreak, because this cannot stand, but it won’t be answers he’ll demand from them. This is only the culmination of a landslide he’s willfully, shamefully ignored for far too long, one that started five years ago with the Sandaime’s order that the clan concentrate their efforts on protecting the civilians from the Fox’s rampage. The accusations of cowardice and conspiracy that have dogged the name Uchiha ever since could only ever lead to this. He lays a gentle hand on Nanami’s shoulder, and the Lord of the Uchiha declares _no more_.

Shisui doesn’t celebrate the day Itachi comes home with a scarlet tattoo. Instead, he sits on blue velvet cushions in a darkened living room and plots treason with a man he’d follow into Hell itself. That man doesn’t take off his black, high-collared shirt, but then he’s always been the stronger of the two of them, even if he never quite believes it. Shisui can’t stand to talk about this unless he’s wearing Jounin blues. The Uchiha fan burns, a banner of untempered arrogance and bitter pride. The symbol of his own shame. Shisui owes Fugaku-sama his life and more, but he will not turn his blade on his people. He will not stand aside and see Konoha torn asunder. (A voice whispers of Nanami-chan, of a wheelchair and a guide dog and that it was the Sandaime who drove the first cracks with his thinly-veiled accusations, but Shisui’s a master of genjutsu, and by extension of his own mind. His choice is made.) It’s Itachi he worries about. Fugaku-sama’s son and heir, the Hokage’s trusted soldier and the clan’s only lifeline now. But Itachi only breathes out slowly and smooths shaking hands over familiar softness before he etches precise black characters next to Uchiha Kaito’s name: shinigami. The Reaper. Fugaku’s right hand, and Shisui’s father. Dark eyes flick upward. Itachi’s hands are down, his guard is open. It’s an offer, if Shisui wants to take it. The very thought makes him sick. Shisui sketches the same two characters next to Uchiha Mikoto, sparing Itachi from having to brand his own mother a threat to Konoha. Itachi will save them, so it’s Shisui’s duty and his _honor_ to save him.

Mikoto shivers in the dark. She’s let her forge go cold just twice before this: the terrifying weeks spent with her own life force and that of her unborn child sustained by a circle of seals worked into the stone bunker floor, and three quiet days five years later, holding another newborn to her chest and shaking in the certainty that the easy delivery promised only a battle delayed. Mikoto breathes in old smoke and chouji oil, ash and iron. Four days. It feels like a lifetime, and like fine grains of sand sliding through her fingers. She’ll be in the vanguard when they hit the Tower, the upper arm of the pincer attack, driving the spear to meet her husband’s ground forces. The underlying logic of her placement at Itachi’s right hand doesn’t escape her. Her son is strong, he came into this world a warrior, but he has long argued against this fight. If he falters... She breathes out. If Itachi falters, it will fall to her to do what Fugaku never could. She remembers that old certainty, staring down at the tiny, fragile child in her arms, and thinks of the keen eyes and quick, clever hands of a girl once apprenticed in her forge. Konoha took one of them from her. It will not take the other. A battle delayed.

Madara learns their names over two long years. He visits each and every home at least once, returns a Genin’s misaimed kunai (Uchiha Keiko) and spurs a subtle draft to wake an old widower from his nightmares (Uchiha Masaaki). He owes them this, and he owes it to the boy. Part of him whispers that he owes it to Izuna, to Katsuro and Ryouta and Takumi, to take his place among his clansmen and lead the Uchiha to victory. But he hasn’t time for such things now. Other plans are in motion and if Konoha falls, so shall the world. Instead, he watches the boy splinter and crack atop the Naka cliffs, and then stands in awe as he rises with new eyes. The young man floating in the river may be Madara’s direct descendant, but in this child, his bloodline runs true.

There’s an old oasis hidden in the heart of Konoha, a respite for the brave, broken men and women who walk in the shadows. It’s a place where the Nameless are known on sight, and the living dare not enter. It’s scarlet cushions on bloodstained tatami, and low, broad tables nailed firmly to the floor. It’s shattered glass scattered like caltrops, because its proprietor is _not_ cleaning up another shot-glass projectile thrown by startled reflexes when nerves wound too tight begin to fray. After all, the minefields are how his patrons know this place is real. He knows all their faces—both faces—and shelters them from the sunlight for as long as they need his asylum. Some need it more than others. The young Captain who keeps his back to the wall when he’s alone, and to the room when he’s with his team. The untrusting one with steady hands who invariably checks each glass and bottle and plate for poison, even those not his own. The one who never comes in armor, but plants himself like an ancient, solid oak between the door and his men. The one who takes a deeper breath of close, smoke-laden air and commits the refuge of this place to memory, as if he knows he won’t be here long. This clandestine sanctuary has a name, seldom spoken, and to know it is the highest honor. But most just call it _taifuu no me_. The eye of the storm.

Jiraiya pockets another scrap of parchment. Like the others, it’s coated with wax to resist the elements for a short time, a few days at the most. If he misses a drop, it’ll melt like spun sugar. A messenger hawk dropped the coordinates into his (very _occupied_ ) lap forty-eight hours ago, and he hasn’t stopped running until he hit the designated stretch of shoreline on Wind Country’s western coast. Open water and bare sand leave nowhere for an enemy to lurk in ambush, and the multilayered cipher matches the one used in the previous messages. He cracked it three years ago, but that was with the unwitting help of Intel’s finest and no shortage of good fortune. This one is simple enough to translate: ‘Child secure. Shadow moving east. Six-ten hunters, River channel.’ The Ichibi’s young carrier remains safe in Sunagakure for now, but the Kazekage is moving with a retinue of sixty Wind Country ANBU to the Ishikari Channel, a tiny inlet at the southernmost tip of River Country. If Wind and River have reached an agreement to expand the route, Suna could avoid the taxes and scrutiny of the contentious Tenryuu River, the primary seaport between Wind and Fire. Jiraiya frowns. Or, if they didn’t, the Kazekage could carve a direct corridor to the Bay of Fire and travel unnoticed. It’s not the least bit suspicious for Suna to be seeking covert passage to Fire Country en masse three months before Konoha is set to host the Chuunin Exams. Not alarming at all. He brushes a thumb over the feather signet scratched under the last row of coded characters. He wonders if Sarutobi-sensei will admit their wandering crow’s identity if Jiraiya asks. What would it cost his dear teacher to speak of treason and murder and the little child who stood at Fugaku’s side over the killing fields of Kosaka grown into a man?

Yuko looks down at her young partner’s sleeping form, nestled uneasily in the waist-high grass of the western plains. The sweltering heat of Fire Country summer is turning with the first hint of autumn’s chill. Tomorrow, the man below will rise before dawn. He’ll wash in the river, eat a few pieces of the previous night’s skewered rabbit, and tend his brace of kunai with ritual calm. The man beside him will wake to the rasp of steel over a scarred, ancient whetstone, one he hasn’t seen before and won’t see again. His breathing will slow, silent and controlled, as they break camp and hidden away in his pockets, his fists will clench until nails bite through callused skin. The twenty-second of August never passes without blood on Itachi’s hands.

Kisame isn’t sure what to make of it the first time he catches Itachi with a needle. He’s never been one to begrudge another man his vices, but that glimpse of pale, shaking hands in a back-alley littered with refuse from the very worst of humanity strikes him as _wrong_ for reasons he can’t quite explain. Whatever private hell he burns in, Itachi holds it close and secret and holy. It’s plain as day behind midnight eyes. And it’s killing him. Kisame feels the truth of this the first time he hears a wet, choking cough in the night, followed by the unmistakable metallic tang of blood, then the barest whisper of genjutsu and artificial silence. When he shivers at unbearable heat radiating from a slender body, living fire licking at his back while steady fingers stitch a gash across Kisame’s shoulder. When fever spikes and chakra gutters, and Itachi shatters Jiro-sensei’s already dubious sanity with the Tsukuyomi. Then Akira-sensei’s, and Kisame stands silent seething vigil in another rundown hotel room instead of sprinting flat-out for the nearest morally flexible healer. He has one last card to play, if he dares. Madara could put an end to this. Whatever twisted, bitter understanding runs between the last surviving Uchiha clansmen, Madara _knows_ Itachi in a way Kisame never will. Never could, even if one day Itachi might let him. He can feel Itachi slipping away, and if he doesn’t do something, he’ll be burying another partner by springtime.

Genma cares far too deeply for a veteran ANBU soldier. He’s stood in the supernova of Minato-sama’s reflected light and then the lightningstorm of Kakashi’s, with a medic’s fire and a killer’s arctic calm. Kakashi very likely saved his life when he put Genma’s name on the roster for the winter Trials that year. (Actually _asking_ Genma first would apparently have been a step too far.) But Itachi saved his soul when avid crimson eyes fixed on green-glowing hands. The desolate hunger in Itachi’s face that day was achingly familiar, and something in Genma’s frozen heart reached out to meet it. Teaching Team Ro’s brilliant, infuriating little rookie the fundamentals of medical ninjutsu gave him a lifeline against the siren song of the dark, drawing him further from the assassin’s path. Maybe that’s why he can’t bring himself to hate him. Not yet. Not until he latches the window and rearms the security seal, ghosting over the clay tile roof of the orphan barracks with a nod to Iwashi. They don’t talk anymore. Genma _can’t_. It’s enough to know that Iwashi’s in the village more than Genma can stand to be, and that his boots have worn a shallow groove at the top of a telephone pole above the room where Minato-sama’s son dreams of taking his father’s seat. Genma stops for a moment at the edge of the roof, just feeling for the reassuring warmth of the child’s sleepy chakra. It’s so much like _his_ that Genma doubts he’ll ever be able to meet the boy’s eyes in daylight. A few thousand ryou, three simple outfits and a pair of sturdy sandals that will only fit for a few months at the rate he’s growing, and some goddamn _vegetables_ —because honestly, does this child think he can survive solely on konbini noodles?—are all he can do. He wipes away a single tear with the back of one gloved hand, and that’s when he feels it. Wild, disordered chakra that burns like a scream against Genma’s senses. It flares hot and blinding bright for a long moment until the nightmare snaps with an audible thunderclap. In the silence that follows, the swirling, searing energy gradually settles into a familiar pattern, the meditation sequence all students learn in the Academy. Genma creeps back down the roofline and drops silently onto the railing of a small stone balcony. Inside, a boy in navy pajamas kneels in formal seiza before an antique weapons chest. He isn’t crying. He probably can’t, anymore. His eyes are hollow and haunted and the air thrums red with power. The boy rests one tiny hand over a scarlet fan carved into the elaborate saya of a nodachi nearly as long as he is tall. The weapon is familiar, once worn at the side of a Tokubetsu Jounin who tore through Kumo’s front lines like an avenging angel. Her son draws it now, bony shoulders straining, elbows locked and arms shaking under the weight. Now, Genma hates Itachi.

Raidou takes two steps into a cramped, windowless office and promptly punches his new Captain in the _face._ Hound doesn’t dodge, and the dull crunch of bone echoes across stark white walls. Good thing the team’s got its very own resident medic, he thinks viciously, though Viper’s healing hands are occupied pinning Cat in a brutal armbar over the Captain’s desk. Hound looks up, and up, because Raidou isn’t afraid to glower down at Sharingan no Kakashi, and asks quietly, “Are you done?” The echo of Minato-sama is so clear that Raidou very nearly isn’t, but he nods sharply. At some unseen signal, Viper lets Cat up, then flickers forward to kick Raidou through the plaster. He comes up swinging, and two more walls become rapid casualties before they hit open air. One hand catches hold of a loose chestplate strap, and steel sings in the bright sunlight as Viper parries the kunai angled under his ribcage. Senbon fly, not at where Raidou is, but where he lands an instant later, pivoting dangerously on a bent TV antenna. The dull brown sheen of resin across their tips erases any momentary twinge of guilt about the knife. He drives Viper westward, because if they’re dealing with his legendary poisons, he’s not _about_ to let it happen in the village proper. It’s only later, after miles of downed trees, sucking mud, and scorched earth, that he sees the glint of tears behind the other man’s mask. They’re not because of his shattered ulna, just like Raidou’s own aren’t from the fire spreading through his veins. Genma tosses him a vial of antitoxin, underhand. Raidou catches it, and hunts up a stick still long enough to make a splint. It takes a while, and his sluggish muscles feel like old cloth by the time he yanks the knots tight. Even one-handed, Genma can still pin him against a burned-out oak. Even with a hole in his chest that has nothing to do with sawdust and drywall, chakra and steel, Raidou finds he can still let him.

Gai hears it through the grapevine, from Panther after another day spent lurking in the Hokage’s shadow, who broke the news to a disbelieving Tanuki at shift change, who told Heron over drinks, who cornered Lynx in the barracks, who whispered to Gecko on Wall duty, who now flashes two precise signals as Gai’s team darts through the village gates with their minds already on debriefing, paperwork, and ANBU’s eternal vendetta against trees. _Man down. Hound._ Gai’s blood runs cold, and he breaks from his squadron without a second’s hesitation. Mission-calm holds him steady as his chakra twists into the shunshin, wrenching himself through a series of breakneck translocations across rain-slick rooftops. He doesn’t breathe until chakra-limned feet alight on a crumbling brick windowsill, and promptly has to dodge a reflexive barrage of kunai and shattered glass. A ragged lightning strike of howling wind and splintered chakra follows as the trap over the broken window loses integrity. To Gai, it sounds like a scream. Frantic eyes scan the spartan studio apartment—clean, suspiciously so, but with fresh shuriken divots in the battered plaster, and are those _paper grocery bags_ on the kitchen counter? Then his thoughts run aground on the lean, angular figure in crisp Jounin blues gradually easing out of a fighting stance, on a stiff green vest and damp, unkempt silver hair falling forward over a polished hitai-ate. It’s been close to a decade since he’s seen Hound in anything but blood and scars or ANBU black. Grief and terror war in Kakashi’s visible eye, clenched jaw painfully obvious beneath thin fabric instead of solid white ceramic, and suddenly he understands. Slowly, he unlatches his Horse mask and climbs inside over broken glass. The Sandaime listened, or the Commander did. Kakashi was out of ANBU. Thank the gods.

Yuugao stands quietly in front of an empty locker in ANBU HQ. She doesn’t know what to feel. She isn’t the only one who’s been here, faint smudges on old, tarnished steel stand as a solemn epitaph, sacred as the Heroes’ Stone. A legend walked here. A man bled here. She closes her eyes. Remembers the first time she saw him rise in a halo of lightning, a bloody revenant surging into the fray in a blur of gleaming scarlet steel and thought: _I know you._ Remembers a silent mutual accord in the trenches along the Iwa border, waiting and _waiting_ for the world to end while diplomats posture and snarl across polished wood tables: _I’ll wake you from the nightmares._ Remembers brutal spars that devolved from jutsu and blades to fists and teeth and finally, finally, let her sleep at night. Hound was gone. Her brother-in-arms, her Captain, her first and only student in Mikadzuki Ryu. Gone. She opens her eyes and brushes her fingertips across the locker’s bottom corner. Hound is gone. Kakashi will need her.

Iruka blinks—just once because he’s a _professional_ damn it—at the figure in front of his desk. He’s not the only one. Mako pauses for a fraction of a second after she hands out an A-rank mission scroll (“May your feet fall swift upon the path, Asuma-kun.”), and Keiji stares openly from his corner by the south window, ignoring the trio of Genin standing at (reasonably) crisp attention behind their sensei. A hush falls over the small Saturday queue of shinobi waiting for their next assignment when Hatake Kakashi, hero of Nagama Pass, master of a thousand jutsu and genius student of the Yondaime, murmurs his rank and registration number. Iruka’s probably imagining the way narrow shoulders try to slouch forward under the scrutiny, the hint of tension in his forearms as if he’s consciously fighting not to put his hands in his pockets. Operating on automatic, he offers a three-week solo A-rank in Snow Country. Hatake accepts with a sliver of a bow and vanishes in a faint swirl of smoke. Reeling a little, Iruka raises an eyebrow at Mako, who shrugs. _Jounin,_ she signs. _All crazy._ Well, it’s hardly the strangest thing he’s seen in his (admittedly short) tenure at the mission desk. The evening and weekend shifts are good experience, even if the hours are long piled on top of his teaching schedule. But Hatake returns three weeks and a day later, swapping a completed report for his next assignment. He seems to prefer the off-hours too, and Iruka’s line is frequently the quickest as he masters the Mission Office’s filing system. (It helps that the negligent and the careless have learned to avoid his working hours.) There are no routines in a Jounin’s life, but he thinks warmly that their little paperwork tradeoffs over the past year have almost become one when Hatake waits two and a half minutes longer in Iruka’s queue rather than Mako’s. Two weeks and another successful mission later, Iruka gives the loose bundle of forms a cursory review. A Jounin ought to know the procedure, but he can’t let a legend catch him slacking. He flicks through the cover sheet, the schematics of the target’s private vault, the terrain report, and a requisition for replacement kunai and steel wire with a growing frown. What _language_ was this in? No, he can parse out most of the characters if he really tries. Hatake’s handwriting is just _that_ terrible. And—he glances at the date stamp next to the mission number, rereads it twice in the vain hope that the characters are just smudged, but yes. Two days late. He inhales slowly and looks up into a single curving grey eye. Across the room, Mako dives for cover.

Kurenai never fancied herself a teacher. She was a wraith, a shadow, a face in a crowd, a keen ear and a ripple of genjutsu. She was cool clear water, body and mind, to be poured into any vessel her mission required. She was Kaede and Katsumi and Amaya and a hundred other covers in a thousand different places. So when she sees two children sparring in the woods, she doesn’t expect to sit concealed among the autumn leaves, mentally critiquing unbalanced forms and shaky chakra control. The boy’s aggression is also worrisome. If his opponent didn’t have such a pronounced tendency to give ground, always retreating, always pulling blows before they struck home, he’d have been knocked flat on his back half a dozen times in ten minutes. Really, his guard is atrocious. So when he kicks the girl flying across the clearing, Kurenai sends a sharpened stick straight across his exposed throat, leaving a razor-thin line of scarlet. His surprised shout brings the sound of footsteps, and Kurenai vanishes before she has to try that trick against the Lord Hyuuga himself. She remembers the girl, though, and two years later she learns her name. Hyuuga Hinata. She’s heard Kakashi complain endlessly about the students the Sandaime keeps trying to foist on him, and the increasingly improbable excuses he’s used to shunt them back into the classroom for another year. She’s a liar by trade, but Kakashi lies only to himself. His fear for those children is bone-deep, and if he can be the dam that keeps them back from the battlefield even one day longer, he’ll bear the full weight of the sea without a second thought. But Hyuuga Hinata will walk on water someday, and Kurenai will be the one to show her how.

Sakura speaks two languages. One is blood and steel and bruises, it’s adrenaline and Genin trail-sign, mission scrolls and broken bones and an illicit cup of sake in the Land of Waves after Team Seven’s first Bingo Book kill. The other is a pink coverlet, evening chores, and Sunday brunch. It’s a shiny trinket apology from the northern border when she misses her mother’s birthday, and knowing the coin that bought it was blood money from a bounty well-earned. It isn’t something she can talk about with her sensei or her teammates: three orphans, two with a long shinobi legacy and one without even that. She thinks Naruto picked his surname at random during a history lesson, because there’s no way he’s related to Lady Kushina, the Whirlpool refugee who rose as Konoha’s salvation at the battle of Kikyou Pass, then later the Yondaime Hokage’s wife and the fuinjutsu genius who brought down the Fox even if it cost her everything. For some reason, that thought makes her smile. It must be easier than shouldering a thousand years of Uchiha history. Infinitely easier than bearing the Hatake name. She’s seen men spit at her sensei’s feet in certain parts of the village. She always makes careful note of their faces for the nights when she can’t sleep and a little petty vandalism helps to pass the time. Her father’s always waiting in the kitchen when she slips back through the window over the sink just before sunrise, a ninja habit remembered too late. He smiles gently, helplessly, and offers her the choice of the medkit or the tea kettle. Both end with Sakura tucked under her father’s arm on the sofa, her book balanced on one knee, his on her shoulder. They whisper about physics and chemistry and medicine and anatomy, anything but the polished chrome plate across her forehead or the holster at her thigh, until her mother moves like a shadow and flicks off the light.

Naruto senses the change in late summer. Kakashi-sensei drives them onward with a new intensity, pushing them harder and longer on the training field under the scorching Konoha sun. He’s given them each a new weapon to master by the end of August: Naruto, the fukiya; Sakura, a heavy ironwood bo; Sasuke, the kusarigama. Sakura remarks that Naruto got the blowgun so she and Sasuke could train in peace without his constant chattering, leading to a knock-down, drag-out scuffle that only ends when Sasuke tosses an explosive tag between them, forcing them to scatter or be blown apart. He’s taken the kusarigama as a personal challenge, usually breathing hard long before Naruto arrives at dawn to find him cocooned in a cage of flickering light. It’s not just the sunrise lending a red tint to the steel, and more than once, Naruto holds the other boy down while Sakura tends blackened chain-link bruises and festering blisters across Sasuke’s palms. With just over a week to go before their deadline, the trio turn to sparring, testing their newfound capabilities with their sensei standing ready to intervene if anyone’s control should slip. Then Sasuke demands a round against Kakashi himself, and drowning-dark eyes burn feral crimson. There’s no trace of Kakashi-sensei’s usual veneer of idle disinterest. Their teacher draws a mid-length katana, the guard nicked and the tsuka worn but the blade deadly sharp and freshly oiled, and beckons. The battle rages until well after nightfall, where it ends with a bone-breaking crack of impact and Kakashi’s low, “Well done.” It’s rare praise, but Sasuke meets it with an unsteady lurch forward, chain uncoiling in a viper’s strike. The weighted ball meets only empty air. Kakashi is gone, and Sasuke collapses to one knee with a breathless, strangled scream of fury. Cautiously, Naruto offers him a hand up, and doesn’t hide his surprise when a heavy arm drapes across his shoulders in exhausted surrender. Sasuke leans hard against Naruto’s side, all trembling heat and sweat and steel, and Naruto follows his teammate’s mumbled directions through the village streets. The neighborhood they enter is long deserted, paved streets cracked and broken and flowerbeds overgrown with weeds, but Sasuke leads on until he stumbles away from Naruto’s grip to sit heavily on the edge of a weathered wooden porch. Naruto sits beside him in the shadow of a forsaken mansion, and wraps an arm tight around Sasuke’s heaving back.

Orochimaru looks down upon his creation and declares it _magnificent_. The curse seal’s chakra burns itself into the child’s own, and its architect muses on fate and fortune. The other one showed so much promise, years ago in Rain Country. That one fought him to a fuming draw on a mountain pathway and showed him the true potential of the Sharingan bloodline. But that one also stood in Madara’s shadow. To assail them both would have taken the might of entire nations, and in the end, his prize would have been a failing body with eyes already burning. This one, however, has only a mewling child and the rabid fox at his side. Even the watchful teacher is long gone, a tamed wolf waiting in the crowd at the edge of the forest, ignorant of what unfolds within. This one will come to him willingly, when he wakes to his newfound glory, and Otogakure will be waiting with open arms. Until then, Orochimaru will pave the way. It’s time he paid his former Commander a visit, long though it’s been since Orochimaru last walked the winding roads of Konoha. Deep in the labyrinth of Root’s hidden corridors, he can await the next stage of his plan in safety and comfort. What’s one month’s time, when eternity lies ahead?

Sasuke is relentless. Once an eight-year-old burning his hands to the bone night after night to master the Great Fireball technique and take his place in the resplendent legacy of the Uchiha. Then a haunted, furious young man who will stop at nothing to take his vengeance and lay the shades of his nightmares to rest. He’s molded his body and mind to a single purpose with brutal efficiency, and nothing—not Konoha, not Team Seven, not the oaths he swore or the hollow ache in his heart is allowed to be a distraction. ( ~~He’s so much like Itachi, that way.~~ ) He’s weighed his loyalty to his village against the secrets he can learn from one of the Sannin and found his homeland wanting. His defection was a calculated decision...or so he tells himself in the dark when he shivers with the absence of Naruto’s sunfire chakra, the silence deafening without Sakura’s razor wit and his back unprotected without Kakashi’s steady presence watching over them from behind the cover of his books. If Kakashi hadn’t treated him with kid gloves perhaps things could have been different, but that’s a path he dares not follow now. He’s only growing stronger, using Orochimaru as much as the snake is using him. He’s found the traitor’s old Akatsuki ring, and he knows he’s on the only road that will lead him to his goal.

Tenzou’s early years with Root and Danzou’s harsh philosophies give him the framework to understand (and maybe in his darker moments almost accept) Itachi’s mission, but he’s still had to watch his closest friend and trusted Captain be ripped apart inside for years. First when a little child stepped into the arena at the ANBU Trials, and Hound scared the hell out of Tenzou by going after the Uchiha heir with everything he had. Then cold, cutting professionalism that finally met its match in a barren desert safehouse and gave way to quiet despair as Kakashi told the story of another Uchiha, so long ago. To a bond forged in blood and fire between four men in the service of Konoha, and a slender silhouette that found its place at Hound’s right hand. To numb shock and winter-steel rage and endless self-recrimination in the wake of atrocity. To too many harrowing nights spent concealed beneath a warded, trapped window, concentrating on the distant crackle of living chakra and thinking of Konoha’s White Fang. Something small and cowardly whispers that he should let his suspicions lie. That no good can come of bringing this into the light. That he has a responsibility to Konoha, to Kakashi and Genma, to protect them from this truth. The weight of the Vice-Commander’s mantle is so much heavier than it seemed when Yuusuke was carrying it. He sighs. His mind was made up long ago, when Kakashi found Naruto broken and bleeding but _alive_ at the Valley of the End. Itachi’s mission, he could sanction. He could mourn his brother-in-arms silently in the dead of night, and stitch together the cracks in his heart—the gnawing questions, the shadow of mistrust that colors every word he hears at Commander Sagara’s side in the Council chambers, the gut-felt murderous _rage_ that washes through him each time Danzou’s eyes flicker to Tenzou in imperious approval—with the Konoha spiral. But he knows Orochimaru. He knows what it takes to survive that man, and Sasuke doesn’t have it in him. And that one, simple fact opens the floodgates. He will not watch Kakashi unravel before his fallen student’s grave, or worse, at Orochimaru’s feet when he returns for blood wearing Sasuke’s face. He will not lose Genma to the graveyard shift again, healing hands soaked in shadow, stained red-brown and dealing only death. He will not see Konoha fall when the tailed beasts mass at the gates without the likes of the Yondaime or Kushina-sama to single-handedly hold back the heavens. And he will not see Itachi rotting in an unmarked mound of earth, far from home, wreathed in black and scarlet clouds. So he dismisses the contingent of ANBU surrounding the Godaime’s office, clearing the room of listening ears, and drops into a full shinobi kneel.

Danzou’s watched his homeland fall into indolence, a decadent pantomime of its former strength. The core is rotten, and decay only spreads like a blood-poison through the veins of the village he has served and defended for over half a century. Hiruzen’s protracted, wavering reign was nearly the end of them, even bolstered by the flashfire that was young Namikaze. It wasn’t discernment that the Sandaime lacked. No, that may have been forgivable, if appalling for the man who wore the Hokage’s robes. It was the will to act. Too long the statesman, never the shinobi. Too long in the light, leaving others to walk in the shadow. Orochimaru’s damnable recklessness. The Iwa armistice, its humiliating terms an insult to tens of thousands of lives lost. Even faced with civil war, he could not bring himself to strike. But for all Hiruzen’s prevarication and equivocation, Danzou still sat at the Hokage’s right hand in the Council chambers. Shield and sword and scapegoat. For Konoha’s continued prosperity, Danzou’s bloody hands are a small price to pay.

Tsunade kneels in the dark, her back to the Tower’s curved glass window. Against the wall, a heap of fabric glimmers faintly in a stray beam of moonlight, lying white and blood red. The regalia of her office. She leaves them where they’ve fallen, topped with broken glass and splintered wood and a crumpled, faded photograph she couldn’t bring herself to _burn._ She almost laughs at the quiet terror that gripped her when ANBU’s newly-appointed Vice-Commander knelt before her desk with cold-forged steel in his heart and a firestorm in his eyes. It’s been a long time since she was called to answer for Orochimaru’s crimes, but she’s never run from that reckoning. She never will. But she never imagined this. Sarutobi-sensei left no record beyond a tiny weatherproof box and a paperclipped sheaf of parchment scraps all bearing the same rough rendering of a feather beneath coded warnings, and if she knows Danzou at all, the man will take his secrets to his grave. There’s only one way to find the truth. One last gamble. Slowly, she resettles the weight of two hundred and fifty-six Uchiha lives on her already burdened conscience. The Godaime Hokage stands and places her bet on a rising young Commander, a twice-court-martialed field medic, and a Jounin loose cannon.

Pakkun knows that look. A trapped animal with nothing left to lose. He smells blood, and sickness, and _rot,_ and he doesn’t want it anywhere near his Pack. Then he sees its eyes. Where he expected madness and despair, he finds something infinitely more dangerous. Unflinching resolve forms the bedrock of Uchiha Itachi, and it reaches all the way down into Hell. Sakumo looked like that, at the end. And Kakashi then looked exactly as he does now: brittle iron, hollowed out. Seeking some twisted absolution from a man who no longer had it to give.


End file.
